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Manuscript Hsog-Stanford "Universities in Trouble: The Current Crisis in American Higher Education” Presentation at a meeting jointly organized by the German Stanford Association and the Hertie School of Governance Berlin, October 19, 2010 Hans N. Weiler1 As one listens and looks around the U.S., the state of higher education seems to have become a matter of rather serious concern. The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, writes an article in the New York Times on “the university’s crisis of purpose”2; John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, worries about a possible “collision point” over federal research funding for universities3; Mark Taylor, one of Columbia University’s distinguished scholars, writes about “academic bankruptcy” on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times4; The Economist, under the somewhat mischievous title “Declining by Degree”, asks whether America’s universities will go the way of its car companies and concludes “America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of General Motors”5; James Adams of the National Bureau of Economic Research asks in a recent paper “Is the U.S. losing its pre-eminence in higher education?”6; wherever you look, higher education is being criticized from the political right as well as the political left for being inefficient, costly, and overstaffed with administrators, the common theme being expressed in the subtitle of one recent book: “How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It.”7 So what’s going on? Is this the American system of higher education that we all used to like and cherish, and that some of us liked to think of something like the gold standard of higher education? Obviously, a good part of this is the usual cycle of euphoria and malaise that is typical of the discourse on such inherently capricious subjects as higher education. German higher education had the most recent incarnation of its own malaise 1 Professor of Education and Political Science, Emeritus, Stanford University (www.stanford.edu/people/weiler; [email protected]) 2 Drew Gilpin Faust, The University’s Crisis of Purpose. New York Times, September 6, 2009. 3 The Stanford Report, June 10, 2010. 4 The New York Times, August 15, 2010. 5 Declining by Degree: Will America’s Universities Go the Way of Its Car Companies? The Economist, September 2, 2010. 6 James D. Adams, Is the U.S. Losing Its Preeminence in Higher Education? National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series No. 15233, Cambridge, MA, 2009 (www.nber.org/papers/w15233). 7 Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It. New York: Holt/Times Books, 2010. See also Jay P. Greene, Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education (Goldwater Institute Policy Report, August 17, 2010) (http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941); Mark Schneider, The Cost of Failure Factories in American Higher Education (American Enterprise Institute, Education Outlook No. 6). Washington: AEI, 2008 (http://www.aei.org/outlook/28863). 1 in the late 1980s and early 1990s when people like Peter Glotz considered German universities “rotten to the core” and Jürgen Mittelstraß thought they were “incapable of reform”8. Even though these criticisms were largely well deserved at the time, German higher education seems to have survived that crisis reasonably well. Will American higher education survive its current malaise similarly well, or are matters more serious than that? That is not a trivial question. After all, even though you may not subscribe to the notion of the U.S. being something like the gold standard in higher education, there is no question but that, at least for the second half of the 20th century and for better or worse, American higher education has been an extraordinarily influential model for higher education worldwide. If that system should now be in some state of crisis, it would be no trivial matter for the world of higher learning at large. I will present to you my own analysis of what is going on in American higher education. My overall conclusion is that, first, yes, the American system is in trouble; secondly, that it is in several kinds of trouble at the same time; thirdly, that the system, or at least some parts of it, will survive its current predicament; and fourthly, that in the process, these different kinds of trouble add up to a serious challenge to the viability of what I see as the American model of higher education. As I see it, there are at least four major challenges that American higher education has to face these days. To deal with any one of them would be a tall order; to face these four simultaneously makes for a formidable task indeed. I am talking about - a challenge of purpose and identity, - a financial challenge, - the challenges of competition, and lastly, and perhaps most seriously, - a political challenge. The challenge of purpose and identity As I already mentioned, just about a year ago Drew Gilpin Faust, a distinguished historian and President of Harvard University, published a remarkable piece in the New York Times entitled “The University’s Crisis of Purpose”9. This is not exactly a new topic, but Professor Faust gives it a much sharper edge against the background of the current economic and financial crisis. She deplores ”the growing dominance of economic justifications for universities” and takes critical stock of the rising tendency to measure the universities’ success more and more by the currency of their contribution to collective and individual prosperity: “The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. It has reinforced America’s deep-seated notion that a college degree serves largely instrumental purposes… But even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should 8 Jürgen Mittelstrass, Die Unis sind reformunfähig, Spiegel Spezial 1993/3, 134-141; Peter Glotz, Im Kern verrottet? Fünf vor Zwölf an Deutschlands Universitäten. Stuttgart: DVA, 1996. 9 Faust, The University’s Crisis of Purpose, op.cit. 2 remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present.”10 She wonders whether “the market model (has) become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education”, and feels compelled to emphasize that universities also have a responsibility to serve as the critical consciousness of society, as a provider of meaning and as a constant source of questioning the assumptions on which our lives are predicated. „Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs” is her concise and emphatic plea for a broader vision of the university’s purpose11. In the wake of the most serious economic crisis the United States has faced in over eighty years, this debate about the identity and the purposes of higher education has become widespread and raises serious doubts about the meaning and identity of the modern university. How does one reconcile the obvious economic utility of higher education with its fundamental commitment to pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge? And when resources get scarcer and scarcer, which of these is going to give? Stanford went through a great deal of soul-searching along these lines when it had to determine, a few years ago and well before the current economic crisis, the priorities for its current, $4.3 billion fund-raising campaign, and ended up with what is a somewhat uneasy attempt to reconcile these two principal functions of a university – including in its priorities human health (with a clear emphasis on stem cell research), the environment and sustainability, the further internationalization of the university, the role of the arts and creativity in human life, K-12 (i.e., primary and secondary) education, and the enhancement of graduate education12. One stage on which this “crisis of meaning” in American higher education (and probably not only in American higher education) is being debated and acted out is the area of content and curriculum, i.e., the question of what, in this day and age, the American college and university should teach, and why – one of the notoriously neglected aspects of university reform everywhere13 and one intimately connected to the question of “what knowledge matters”14. Stanford has just recently appointed a task force of faculty, staff, and students to critically review the entire undergraduate curriculum15, and there are similar efforts underway elsewhere in the U.S.16. This is not surprising, because 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 http://annualreport.stanford.edu 13 Yehuda Elkana, Freedom and Interdisciplinarity: The Future of the University Curriculum. Berlin 2009 (unpublished manuscript); see also the recent manifesto of an international group of scholars in favor of more serious attention to content and curriculum in higher education: www.curriculumreform.org. 14 Hans N. Weiler, Challenging the Orthodoxies of Knowledge: Epistemological, Structural and Political Implications for Higher Education. Guy Neave (ed.), Knowledge, Power and Dissent: Critical Perspectives on Higher Education and Research in Knowledge Society. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2006, 61-87 15 http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february1/undergraduate-curriculum-taskforce-020510.html 16 E.g., William M. Sullivan and Matthew S. Rosin, A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008; Association of American Colleges and Universities, College Learning for the New Global Century: A Report from the National Leadership 3 nowhere does the question of meaning and purpose become more tangible than in the question of what the university expects its faculty to teach and its students to learn.
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